TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Gentoo is one of those distributions that is hailed by some and cursed by others. I've found in my experience that more often than not i'm with the latter group. Read the install notes to see why.

Install:

Installing gentoo linux is painful, long, and unintuitive. It basically consists of reading an HTML Installation Guide, switching to another virtual terminal (ALT+F2 for the great unwashed) and entering in commands that could easily have been put into a simple shell script that would make this less of an exercise in monotony.

If you choose to compile everything on your local machine (a feature that is relatively unique to gentoo and its predecessors, sorcerer linux and linux-from-scratch) it will take you several days to finish the installation while you watch the GCC compiler spout endless "BLAH command is deprecated, using FOO instead" warnings at you.

The good news is if you can sit through it, once the install is done you have a small, fast, easy to maintain and upgrade distribution and you'll learn a lot about Linux in the process.

Package Selection:

Gentoo doesn't install anything on its own, per se, so package selection is entirely up to you. The one unique feature of gentoo is their "portage" system for managing packages. It's similar to apt for any of you who've used Debian.

Basically, if you want to install, say, frozen bubble (any why wouldn't you?) then you type emerge frozen-bubble and gentoo looks up the sources, downloads them, compiles them, and does the same for any dependencies you need (for example, frozen bubble requires the perl-SDL package) and installs them as well.

It takes a long time, particularly if one of your dependencies is large. I found this out the hard way when I tried to install elinks (a text mode web browser) and apparently one of its dependencies is the entire XFree86 windowing system. Go figure.

The upside to the 4 hour process was that once elinks was finally installed, I also had a working (in theory) X11 windowing system. Unfortunately like every other Linux, gentoo relies on the proprietary ATI driver for my video card, which sucks horrendously and never works correctly if at all, so X11 is not something I'm blessed with.

Most Annoying Feature:

Having to parrot commands off an HTML document and then wait DAYS for everything to compile. The install process is not meant for your average joe user.

In gentoo's defense, they have recently started offering a CD with precompiled packages that is supposed to speed up the process. My biggest problem with gentoo is not getting it installed, which I have performed successfully dozens of times, but keeping it working once I reboot.

Inevitably either GRUB refuses to boot the kernel image I made because I don't understand the archaic naming scheme they use, or once I boot into it none of my system actually works and instead of the familiar BASH prompt I get BUSYBOX, which is the system recovery console. Only once have I ever sucessfully rebooted into Gentoo.

Who's it best for?

People who have nothing better to do for about a weekend and want geeky bragging rights for their box, apply here. Anyone else who wants a stable, working system in a reasonable amount of time, stay away. Stick to Fedora or Mandrake.